“Colonialism is the massive fog that has clouded our imaginations regarding who we could be, excised our memories of who we once were, and numbed our understanding of our current existence.”

Waziyatawin. (2005)

Monique McDowell was a woman seemingly frozen in time.

In the interval that the majestic being of light and energy had descended gracefully from the turbulent roiling heavens above the wreck of Rig D31 and uttered it’s portentous introduction to the captain of the USS Astute, “I am The Speaker”, Monique had been figuratively transported to that moment over a year ago, when she sat upon the councilors couch aboard Starbase 72 and had jousted words and justifications with Councilor Juran over her ability to regain command status following the aftermath of Thaddeus’s death.

McDowell balked as the warm surrounds of the counselling suite receded as suddenly as she had seemed to have been transported there, the ever-pervasive salt – sting of the howling winds across the twisted ruin of the rig’s shuttle pad returning her to the here and now – where no appreciable time had passed.

It had all felt so real.

The incandescent – titan hung a few feet over the blackened members that protruded like broken ribs from the scorched and shatter wrent carved into the deck by the assault of its vengeful – peer and Monique could not quite help to feel a little awed and even frightened by the manifest power of this alien being and it’s serried spectral – choir that hung high above her, looking down on the proceedings.

“You did that, didn’t you?” McDowell breathed in realization. “You looked inside my mind, rummaged through my memories there. I felt you.”

The blank, featureless visage of The Speaker slowly nodded at this revelation and Monique’s heart raced as she realized that the being could understand her.

“What else did you find in there?” Monique peered up at the creature, the VISOR on her face enabling her to see the beings who (presumably) had co-existed alongside the colonists for some considerable time, if the adoption of a gesture as common as a nod was anything to go by.

“And why did you pause at that particular memory?” She wondered aloud as the gnomic entity, wreathed in a beautiful coronal – miasma of light akin to angelic – wings, stared impassively at her.

Why had The Speaker conjured up a memory so inextricably associated with her own grave and personal experience of pain and loss? What commonality was being attempted to be expressed by the creature?

As if in answer to her entreaty, The Speaker reached out it’s long, slender arm and extended its anthropomorphic digit, in a tableau reminiscent of Michelangelo’s renowned fresco of the “Creation of Adam” and despite her better reasoning, Monique extended her own slim, brown finger – mirroring the motion – despite some part of her cautioning her that she was about to make a point of contact with a being of pure interphasic – energy and how unwise that probably was from a physical safety perspective.

“And God created man in his own image.” McDowell found herself breathily quoting Genesis as she received her own divine spark of intellect on behalf of humanity.

Instantaneously she was struck by a tremendous energetic forced that drove all reason and sense of place and time from her consciousness and suddenly she was somewhere else.

The rig was no longer there beneath her feet.

She had no feet.

As Monique reeled from the shock of transition from once place to another, she became aware to her growing panic that she had also exchanged one state of being for another.

With a steadily growing animal panic, she looked down but could not see her body. Could not feel her own body. Her thoughts were…different…disjointed somehow, but at the same time sublimely unified and distributed.

Reeling from the disorientation, McDowell cast about and became aware of The Speaker, in its humanoid form, as the mysterious being hung no further than it had been situated from her aboard the remains of the Genodyne Systems facility, seconds ago.

Together they hung many hundreds of feet above the perpetual undulation of the ever – migrating ocean waves below and Monique came to understand that they were still on Encedis-#5 and that, somehow they hadn’t changed location at all.

The ferocity of the storm that mantled the heavens above, exhorted its destructive bellow as vivid strakes of purple – lightning seared the horizon with an intensity that Monique had yet to witness during her short time upon the ocean – world and instinctively she knew that what she was currently experiencing had occurred a very, very long time ago.

The Speaker itself flared with an incandescent light that was far beyond the intensity that the upgraded VISOR had been able to afford her paltry human eyes. It shone like the very heart of a White Dwarf star, but rather than causing her to shield her eyes, she found that not only could she view the entity without pain – that her own being had been somehow transformed to a similar state of interphasic energy.

She had become an angel of light.

As her mind adjusted to this revolutionary realization, she became aware – no – she felt literally thousands upon thousands of similar minds to her own. Formless, endless – this vast network of shared consciousness of complex and diverse beings such as The Speaker and herself were distributed across the face of the planet – given both sustenance and purpose by the eternally raging ion – storms that mantled the skies.

In that instant, Captain Monique McDowell experienced the indescribable but pervading connection with these beings and the ecosphere of this word and experienced a causal link that was literally eons – old. Both the creatures and the storms were linked by a symbiosis as inextricable as that of human beings to a nitrogen/oxygen rich environment.

Indistinct and without form (unlike The Speaker as it presented itself now), this vast communal mind of defined individuals took upon the ascribed roles of caretakers of the planet and Monique watched in mute astonishment as subjective millennia spun past, day and night cycles becoming a queasy blur, as the beings shepherded myriad miracles of aquatic species in the native depths below – adjusting the ratio and relationship between ionic radiation and ocean – acidification to create and nurture the evolutionary progression of diverse & colorful forms of life.

Monique could feel the beautiful simplicity of satisfaction that this stewardship brought to this collective people, as generations of life came and went in the ocean depths below and she too felt satisfied with their work.

In lieu of language and shared experience, Monique realized that The Speaker was sharing its own memories with her, giving them a shared lexicon of understanding through this mutually – experienced view of the past just as it had delved her own memories.

Memories of loss…

As the centuries flowed by, suddenly the heavens were illuminated from above with a light quite different from the habitual flow of lightning that roofed the world.

The Outsiders came, blind to the presence of The People and with them they brought their technology and strange song of power.

Monique watched as first the Genodyne Systems Colonists established the basecamp that would swell and one day become the fantastical undersea city of Mariner’s Deep and then began to set up the first Aquaculture Rig.

She watched as consternation began to flow throughout the collective consciousness of The People at the sudden appearance of these intruders from beyond the sky. Opinion was split between the more reactionary and inflammatory of their number that reasoned that these Outsiders must be driven out, whilst others more like The Speaker appealed for reason and held that the world was vast and surely there was space for all to prosper, if just an understanding could be reached with these visitors from the stars?

But no understanding was forthcoming, even though The People took upon themselves the unfamiliar forms of these strange people – hoping  to better understand them. They wandered alongside them as they worked, trying to glean meaning or intent from their actions – but these intentions proved as oblique and alien to them as the endless machines that they seemed to generate out of thin air and the hubris in which they freely distributed them around the ocean – world.

But the colonists seemed to be unable to see them, even though they walked beside them.

Similarly, their entreaties fell upon deaf – ears as the people that were inexorably spreading out and dominating their world, seemed heedless to their despair.

More they took and more they built, spreading further and further with each passing year, polluting the very skies with their strange energy signatures that were as an anathema to The Speaker and its kind, filling the oceans with outlandish creations of their own as they gradually poisoned the sea.

Then they began to tame the skies.

Monique felt her own energetic – essence start to wane, and she experienced the same visceral dread and panic as her own symbiotic tether to the nurturing storms began to be teased out – a lifeline becoming a tendril, becoming a thread as the Outsider’s technology banished the storms from the heaven and became a Sword of Damocles poised above them all.

She watched in abject horror as, one – by – one, beings that she had felt a connection to for millennia began to slowly wane and fade from existence. The weaker of their kind becoming the first to disappear from this world, victims of the colonists unwitting hegemony.

Realizing that this eventuality would inevitably lead to the eradication of their race, as they had no concept or conceit of violent – action in their culture, those that remained determined to form together in an attempt to merge and pool their interphasic energy to act as a life-boat, an Ark of sorts that might conceivably sustain a seed of who they had been and weather out the bright skies and placid seas – hoping against hope that one day the storms would return and all would be as it once was.

In this endeavor, they sought to set a watchman.

Of their number they chose one whose interphasic essence was the strongest of their people and whose temperament was the most even and they tasked it to remain and keep a weather – eye upon the world, to try and reach out to the Outsiders and reason with them so that the course of the storm might be reversed or restored.

The Watcher.

With dreadful empathy, Monique observed the long and lonely vigil that was kept by The Watcher as it drifted alone and unseen through this once familiar world wherein it was now a singular and solitary ghost. Unseen it walked throughout the strange structures, unbidden it hovered at the edge of their congress and uninvited it sat as the empty chair at their tables and watched them eat the strange creatures they had filled its ocean’s with, at the expense of its own beloved children.

Little by little, even the strength and fortitude that it had been chosen for with which to remain behind, began to fall prey to the exile of the Ion – storms and it too began to gradually fade from this world.

The experience was as profound as it was crushingly tragic.

Then, a War in the Heavens.

The net with which the storms had been entrapped was torn asunder and the storms slowly began to gather in the garish – blue sky and she could feel The Watcher’s joy as those that it had loved began to slowly return, but too few and still too weak.

Some would not return from oblivion at all.

The she felt its rage, a strange and terrifying emotion completely unbeknownst to The People, yet somehow, she could empathize with this volatile state of mind, born as it was from desperation and the desire to save its people.

Through the restored communal link, she felt the terrible corrupting influence absorbing the Outsiders intoxicating power as The Watcher lay waste to the rig and took of the Aliens phasic power – source and merged it with it’s interphasic own. She felt the sorrow and dismay of The People as they felt this new poisonous hybrid spur the Watcher on to event greater heights of rageful destruction and they wondered if the dominion of the Outsiders would ever end?

And just like that, she was back in her own body where she always had been, standing upon the wreck of Man’s hubris in the full and awful judgement of an angel.

Tears rimmed her large brown eyes as the storm left her afro sodden and tore the tears from her cheeks.

“They didn’t know…” She sobbed, quite overcome by the trauma of experiencing hundreds of years of the effects of rampant colonialism from the perspective of the original custodians of the planet.

“They couldn’t know.” She shook her head at the appalling truth of it all. Whether the Genodyne colonists were aware of their supreme transgression against these beings was inconsequential. The damage had been wrought and now all had to deal with the legacy of that egregious oversight.

Captain Monique McDowell screwed her hands together into impotent fists as The Speaker hung silently before her. The implications of the vision that it had shared (that somehow, she knew to be inextricably true) held grave implications for the sovereignty of the planet and even wider and more impactful implications if Genodyne Systems could not resume food production before the rapidly approaching point-of-no-return for ocean acidification brought on by the Ion Storms.

Millions would starve and die, Monique knew this, but she also had to weigh up the fact that an entire sentient people had nearly been eradicated in the pursuit of feeding those mouths and either choice she was faced with seemed to end in the deaths of one people or the other.

Grimly she set her mouth in a stern line and spoke to The Speaker earnestly.

“Difficult choices are ahead of all of us, but I represent an organization whose very existence is dedicated to the furtherance of diplomacy and peace. If there is a peaceful solution where your people and those that came after can share this world, Starfleet is committed to helping you both find it.” McDowell vowed.

“But The Watcher must be stopped.” Captain McDowell insisted. “The path to peace cannot be trod if violence still abounds. Can you help us reach out to them? Convince them to stop?” She pleaded.

The Speaker shook its head slowly and when it spoke, the static – fizz of its words held deep regret.

“The Watcher is lost to us.”

“Dammit!” McDowell swore vehemently and lifted her despairing face to the heavens, just as a crescendo of lightning tore the sky.

And suddenly she knew where The Watcher was going.

“McDowell to USS Astute!” Monique tapped her Commbadge as The Speaker looked impassively on.

“Astute here.” Came the reassuring rumble of Commander Kottu. “Are you okay Captain? Dr Vorik reported that your vital – signs were doing some extremely concerning things just a few moments ago?”

Monique shook her head in frustration, sending a sheet of droplets winging from her tightly – permed hair.

“No time for that, XO!” Captain McDowell interjected. “I need you to issue an evacuation order to the engineering crews assisting with the repairs of the Lightning – Spire in the Southern Hemisphere. Tell Commander Aldridge to gather his people and prep for immediate evac. Notify Lieutenant Aslaine that we need every bird he has in – flight and vectored to the work camp there – this is priority one Commander!”

“Aye Captain. Making it so.” The Executive Officer responded without pause. “For the sake of situational awareness, can you let us know the nature of the threat we are dealing with?”

Monique McDowell looked up at the brooding heavens and the host of The People arrayed there and then to the blank, unknowing irradiance of The Speakers Face.

When she responded, she did so with grave finality.

“Tell them that the Angel of Death is coming and Hell’s coming with him!”